LibreTime services (and other ways to sustain the project)

[gusaus]

Following up on some of @robbt’s comments from Any interest in LibreTime available as a SaaS with hosting and support? - #36 by robbt?

@robbt

So as far as I know no stations running LibreTime have expressed interest in paying for support or development. This could be due to a number of reasons. One possibility is the type of stations using LibreTime are happy with it as-is and don’t have any money in their budget to support a project they can download for free. Or perhaps we haven’t been proactive in soliciting donations from users of LibreTime and they would be willing to use money to support the project if they were asked more frequently.

I think more users would pay for services or financially support the project if it was easier and more obvious to do that.

@gusaus

What if we incorporated similar sections for services, support, membership, etc. into Libretime.org? Think that would be the best way to funnel in users and contributors.

What if we followed through with building out Libretime.org?

@robbt

The real question I think is even if we were able to get money from a number of stations is whether this would be a sufficient amount of money to hire developers full-time. I suspect that it would be a rather small amount in the grand scheme of things and nowhere near the amount required to sustain payroll.

I’m not sure we’d want or need to form an entity and hire staff. Funds for contributors (even full-time… just as long as they’re freelance) can already be routed through Open Source Collective 501(c)(6) fiscal sponsor via LibreTime - Open Collective

@robbt

I suspect that the users of LibreTime would be able to help more if they were to submit testimonials about how LibreTime helps them serve their mission and helped us connect with potential non-profit funders that support development of independent media projects, like those who originally funded the development of Airtime.

One department we are lacking in with comparison to the originators of Airtime is in terms of marketing, promotion and branding. Plus as an organization we are primarily focused on the code which I think is fine and appropriate. We just need to remember what happened to Airtime and how the free & open-source version was more or less abandoned because development was funded almost exclusively by a single entity.

I think probably the most useful thing that we could do rather than trying to make money from hosting would be to reach out to stations that we know are using LibreTime and compile a contact list so that we can get in touch with them regarding new versions, donating to the project in terms of code, word of mouth or promotions.

Again many good marketing and branding ideas we could incorporate into a new LibreTime website. We can do this while keeping the OSS project separate by incorporating some of the models CiviCRM is using to sustain.

Should we create an issue and/or repo in LibreTime · GitHub to work out the details?